Happy Tuesday Wednesday, y’all!
I felt like the love child of Fat Bastard from Austin Powers and Shrek after my first Thanksgiving feast in Connecticut, so the diet started Monday (kind of). I keep telling myself that Rome wasn’t built in a day while I feel like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
P.S. I’ll get back to my regularly-scheduled publication day of Tuesday at some point …
🛁 EXTRA BUBBLES 🛁
Pop culture news was light this week, so I’m opting for an EXTRA BUBBLES TUBZ THROWBACK instead.
From Volume 106
Woman enters MRI machine with a gun and gets shot in the butt
Some ~figuratively~ shoot themselves in the foot. Happens to the best of us. This 57-year-old woman remixed that notion and ~literally~ shot herself in the butt. (She’s alive.) She took the gun with her while entering the MRI machine, “and the weapon was grabbed up by the machine’s magnet, causing the gun to go off.” She might have watched one too many scary movies and realized, “You know what? Better to strap up than be defenseless.” You can’t say she doesn’t take initiative in her life.
While I’m confident none of my readers have ever taken a gun with them to the hospital, much less into an MRI machine, I believe we all have something in common with the at-issue woman: lying at the doctor’s office.
According to the FDA report, the woman was asked if she was carrying a weapon and she answered “no.”
🏆 SPORTZ 🏆
CFB WEEK 14 RECAP
MICHIGAN 13 Ohio State 10: No Jim Harbaugh. An offense that was practically allergic to scoring points all season. A team that hadn’t won on the road all season. This was supposed to be the year for head coach Ryan Day and the $20-million, 19-point favorite Buckeyes to avenge the last three losses to the Wolverines and finally clinch a spot in the Big Ten Championship game. Ohio State proceeded to piss the opportunity down both of their legs and left a big ole puddle of despair and embarrassment.
The Buckeyes’ fourth quarter was a dumpster fire of epic proportions; OSU possessed the ball for just under two minutes, totaling 10 yards, and did not convert a single first down in seven plays.
Offensive coordinator Chip Kelly looking at his play sheet in the fourth quarter:
In total, Michigan ran for 173 yards on 41 carries (a mere 62 passing yards) while holding Ohio State to 77 yards on the ground (three yards per carry) and intercepting QB Will Howard twice.
When Michigan QB Davis Warren threw a “holy sh*t, did he really throw that?” interception near the goal line into the hands of defensive end Jack Sawyer, with the score tied 10-10 in the fourth quarter, I figured OSU would turn the corner and eventually escape with the win. They did not. They went three-and-out.
On the ensuing drive, Michigan RB Kalel Mullings was bottled up at the line of scrimmage on 3rd and 6 from OSU’s 44 with ~6 minutes left, but the Massachusetts native broke free for a 27-yard gain, eventually setting up the game-winning field goal. Believe it or not, things got worse for the Scarlet and Gray after the long run. They committed an illegal substitution penalty on 3rd and 2 with just under two minutes left COMING OUT OF A TIMEOUT, which gifted the Wolverines a first down. Ohio State did not get the ball back until there were 45 seconds remaining.
And then a good old-fashioned brawl went down on the field when the clock struck triple zeroes after a Michigan player planted a flag on the 50-yard line. FOX announcer Gus Johnson spoke in disgust as if someone was stabbed at midfield, as if someone brought a bomb into the stadium and started shouting weird noises. From my vantage point, if you lose to your rival for the fourth consecutive time, this time as a heavy favorite, you lick your wounds and head to the locker room. You had 60 minutes to do something about it. Regardless, kinda funny (not really) that police officers on the field pepper-sprayed some players to break up the shenanigans. At least they didn’t draw their weapons!
At the end of the day, the 2021 Ohio State recruiting class ranked 2nd in the country per 247Sports and boasted seven (!!) five-star recruits. They did not win a single Big Ten title and never beat Michigan, except for Texas QB Quinn Ewers who beat Michigan earlier this season.
O-H, and the quarterback Day & Co. ran out of town, Kyle McCord? He led the nation in passing yards.
Sucks to suck.
CFP RANKINGS
The field appears to be all but set, with one spot being up for grabs.
Ole Miss, South Carolina, and Miami all appear to be eliminated from contention as CFP Selection Committee Chair and Michigan AD Warde Manuel said Tuesday the Committee does not have additional “data points” for those teams and, therefore, cannot leap frog a team already in the field. “Data points” was the buzz word of the night during Tuesday’s CFP Media Conference; it was uttered 14 times, according to the transcript.
If SMU beats Clemson in the ACC title game, the Alabama Crimson Tide will take the final spot.
If Clemson beats SMU, the final spot will come down to Alabama and SMU. And I think the Committee will go with Alabama.
The Committee seems to put an emphasis on predictive statistics, specifically Football Power Index1 and Strength of Record.2
‘Bama: 4th in FPI, 10th in SOR
SMU: 12th in FPI, 9th in SOR
Not to mention, as of the latest rankings, Alabama has three CFP top-25 wins under its belt; SMU has zero. Those are all relevant data points, but it ultimately comes down to this: I don’t think the Committee respects the ACC the same way it does the SEC.
Let’s hope the Pretty Boys from SMU take care of business so that there is not a debate between them and Alabama. Even if they do take care of business, the incest Crimson Tide will still be in the field — unless something massively out of ordinary goes down behind closed doors.
TITLE GAMES
Mountain West: Boise State vs. UNLV (Friday, 8:00 p.m. EST, FOX)
Big 12: Iowa State vs. Arizona State (Saturday, 12:00 p.m. EST, ABC)
SEC: Georgia vs. Texas (Saturday, 4:00 p.m. EST, ABC)
ACC: Clemson vs. SMU (Saturday, 8:00 p.m. EST, ABC)
Big Ten: Penn State vs. Oregon (Saturday, 8:00 p.m. EST, CBS)
NFL WEEK 13 RECAP
LIONS 23 Bears 20: The Chicago Bears found another hilarious way to lose a football game, costing their head coach his job in the process. Chicago battled back from a 16-0 deficit and had the ball down three with 45 seconds left from the Detroit 25 and one timeout in their pocket. If you didn’t watch this game, you might be thinking: Did they get the field goal blocked? Did they shank the field goal? No to both questions — they ran out of time!
QB Caleb Williams took an ill-advised sack on second down. Right then and there, Williams or then-head coach Matt Eberdumbass (Eberflus) should have taken a timeout. Regroup the troops, throw a completed pass toward the sidelines to stop the clock, then trot our your field goal unit for a potential game-winning field goal. But that didn’t happen because, well, the Bears are the Bears. Instead, they didn’t snap it until six seconds left, a play that ended with an incomplete pass well short of the end zone.
In last 30 NFL season, 1,501 times has a team lost by 1-3 pts in regulation (reg+post).
Of those, only the Bears today ran a play from inside the opponent’s 30 on the final drive but ultimately had time expire without bringing out the FG unit & without using all their timeouts.
No chance Eberflus could survive such a blunder, so the Bears sent him packing on Friday, the first time in franchise history that a head coach has been fired during the season, but not before they had him do a press conference earlier that day where Eberflus said he thought his job was safe. “In retrospect could we have done it better? Yes,” Warren said, via David Haugh of 670 The Score. “But we were trying to be respectful.” Warren noted that management had yet to make a final decision and, in essence, did not want to send any smoke signals or increase speculation by delaying Eberflus’ day-after-game press conference. Institutional dysfunction at its finest, ladies and gentlemen.
And make no mistake about it — Warren, not GM Ryan Poles, will be calling the shots in connection with the hiring of the franchise’s next head coach. Case in point, when Warren and Poles held a joint press conference earlier this week to discuss the direction of the franchise, Warren was the one dominating the microphone. The cycle of misery is sure to continue.
CHIEFS 19 Raiders 17: Kansas City’s Devil Magic is on a heater of all heaters. Las Vegas QB Aidan O’Connell was slicing and dicing the Chiefs’ defense on the final drive of the game all the way down the field. Until he wasn’t. There was a miscommunication along the offensive line as the center snapped the ball when O’Connell wasn’t expecting it, resulting in a fumble recovered by the Chiefs at the Kansas City 32. It appeared that one of the refs called a false start, which would have blown the play dead and allowed Las Vegas to retain possession. The actual call: an illegal shift penalty, which didn’t blow the play dead. Game over, and Kansas City’s 14th straight victory in one-possession games.
Despite the loss, Las Vegas tight end Brock Bowers proved he is already one of the best players at his position and should be a lock for Offensive Rookie of the Year. The Georgia product finished with 10 receptions for 140 yards and one touchdown. He is on pace to set the record for the most receptions in a single season by a rookie tight end (he is only three receptions away from setting the record) and the most receiving yards in a single season by a rookie tight end (1,076 is the bar, produced by Mike Ditka in 1961; Bowers is at 884 with five games to play).
A parting thought: I watched part of this game via the alternate broadcast, Prime Vision with Next Gen Stats. Made me feel like this:
🤓 BATH TIME PONDERING 🤓
The temperature was 22 degrees in Connecticut Wednesday morning on my way to the train station. I don’t even need to look up what the temperature was in Dallas, my former city of residence, at the same time because I know it was warmer. So, this week’s question is pretty simple.
If you chuckled and/or enjoyed it, make sure to forward it to others and/or share it on social. Any corrections, omissions, suggestions, etc., send 'em my way. Much love. -Tubz
FPI “measures team strength and uses it to forecast game and season results.”
SOR “reflects chance that an average Top 25 team would have team's record or better, given the schedule.”